One of the
people I follow on Twitter put up a post recently asking why it’s easier to get
people to shell out money to buy your book than it is to get them to review it
if they get it free. I feel her pain.
Probably
the great delusion of every self-published author is that once the book is out,
a couple dozen friends will quickly post positive reviews on Amazon. Hah! A lot
of them won’t even download the book on a free promotion day, and half the
friends who actually do buy the book will insist on getting a hard copy from
you directly. That means, of course, that Amazon has no record of the sale and
won’t let them do a review, even if they wanted to. Which they usually don’t.
On the plus
side, that means the reviews of the book pretty quickly get honest, which means
the author has at least a marginally real idea of how his or her work is being
received.
4.7 Out of 5 Stars
My first
mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance,
is currently averaging 4.1 out of 5 stars, with the overwhelming percentage of
reviewers now being strangers. What mattered most to me about the reviews was
that no one gave it fewer than three stars. That said to me that, whatever they
might have felt about the book’s strengths and weaknesses, the reviewers at
least conceded it a fundamental level of writing competence. That helped me
have the confidence to write the second one.
The second
book, Wash Her Guilt Away, came out
less than a year ago. Fewer friends reviewed it than reviewed the first, so
nearly all the reviews are from strangers. When I put the book up on Amazon, I
held my breath. I had tried to build tension and interest at the beginning
through character development and atmosphere, rather than action and bloodshed,
and had no idea how that would play. When the first three reviews from
strangers came in at five stars, I heaved a sigh of relief.
By the way,
the second book is now averaging 4.7 out of five stars. I feel it’s a more
fully realized work than the first one, and it’s good to see that, so far at
least, readers are agreeing.
Who Writes Reviews, Anyway?
Even so, it
seems to me that my books aren’t getting as many reviews as the sales numbers
indicate they should. Part of that might be that the readership probably skews
older, and older readers are a bit less self-absorbed and inclined to think the
world is waiting for their opinion.
Which got
me to wondering what kind of reviews an undisputed classic gets. So I checked
the Constance Garnett translation of Anna
Karenina on Amazon and found that it had been reviewed by more than 1,200
people. I wonder why any of them thought, at this point, that anyone would care
about what they had to say.
Another
interesting thing was that Anna Karenina
averaged 4.1 out of 5 stars in its reviews — same as my first trashy mystery
and lower than the second. So much for the idea that the crowd generally gets
it right. And you have to feel a bit sorry for poor Tolstoy. His book went up
on Amazon after all his friends were dead and couldn’t help him out with a positive
review.
